Jonathan Tobin in the Jerusalem Post:
When US President Barack Obama met with 15 representatives of American Jewish organizations on July 13, Haaretz reported that he told them that he wanted to help Israel achieve peace but that if they were to benefit from his well-intentioned counsel, Israelis must "engage in serious self-reflection."
The breathtaking condescension toward the Jewish state that this remark betrays, as well as the implicit dismissal of the last 16 years of Middle East history, says a lot about Obama and the direction in which American foreign policy is heading.
The fact that Israel has already gone through several periods of serious self-reflection and made costly sacrifices in terms not only of territory but in blood has no significance for the president.
Here a just a few items that the president seems to think don't matter in assessing the situation...
Tobin goes on to list the failure(s) of Oslo, Camp David, the Disengagement, and more obliquely, Olmert's offer of Jerusalem -only recently revealed, after the fact. He writes that "All have apparently been swept down the White House memory hold."
Now Jonathan Tobin is a big macher, executive editor of Commentary Magazine and he's absolutely right on all counts, but the only reponse that occurs to me is....
Well, DU-UH.
Anybody with half a brain in their head could have seen this coming... BEFORE THE ELECTION. No one had to look any further than Jeremiah Wright. Obama's longstanding and close relationship with his pastor, or even just the simple fact that he embraced that church for TWENTY YEARS, should have sufficed.
Hullo? Can you say... liberation theology? The opportunity to examine Obama's beliefs was wide open in the spring of 2007. (Need I remind anyone that the election was not until November 2008?)
... divorcing Jesus from Judaism arises in the case of liberation theology—that form of religious thought proclaiming that God has a "preferential option for the poor" and seeking to put biblical pronouncement in service to political and economic ends: Jesus is the pedagogue of the oppressed, the redeemer of the underclass, the hero of the masses.
The problem is not the use of Jesus for political ends; the biblical material has always been (and should continue to be) used to promote a more just society. The problem is that the language of liberation all too often veers off into anti-Jewish rants. Jesus becomes the Palestinian martyr crucified once again by the Jews; he is the one killed by the "patriarchal god of Judaism"; he breaks down the barriers that "Judaism" erects between Jew and gentile, rich and poor, male and female, slave and free, and so he can liberate all today. The intent is well meaning, but the history is dreadful, and the impression given of Judaism is obscene.
The poison is there in the founding documents of liberation theology. One of the fathers of the movement, Gustavo Gutiérrez, states in A Theology of Liberation (1973) ... that the "infidelities of the Jewish people made the Old Covenant invalid."
Yes, Tobin is right that even recent history of Israel is of no consequence to Obama, but that should have been expected.
What no one seemed to expect, including myself, was the incredible weakness and stupidity of liberal American Jews, and their intractable allegiance to party over country or even family. It is not Israelis, as Obama suggested, but the Jews in this country who voted for him, who should be engaging in "serious self-reflection."
However, for us to continue discussing even that - at this late date - would be to indulge in a luxury we can ill afford. The damage is done, and we're all living with it. So what can we do, "going forward" ?
The only thing awakened Jews (and other infidels) can do now to save ourselves - and that includes Israel - is to throw every possible monkey wrench into the "progress" of the Obama regime. Sadly, the best we can hope for at this point is to gain time.
We can make more widely known Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) 's declaration of the unconstitutional nature of the power grab by the executive branch (and pray for his recovery so that he might cast his votes against capntrade and healthcare).
We can back Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) in his effort to force Obama's CZARS to be confirmed and overseen by Congress. [You know something's dead-wrong when American Jews of Russian descent don't even blink at the word czar. Makes you wonder if they would react at all were Obama to start ordering "pogroms."]
We can fight two major "pillars" of Obama's policies by vociferously opposing the capntrade boondoggle and the institution of government-run rationed health care in this country.
We can publicly, loudly and enthusiastically support the prime minister of Israel when he asserts that Israel's national sovereignty is beyond the reach of any American president (Rahm Emanuel notwithstanding).
We can boldly go where no Jew would dare to go, and use the A-word -- or equally controversially, demand that the president demonstrate his eligibility as a natural-born citizen to hold the office of the presidency, as was the case with John McCain.
.... Lawyers who have examined the topic say there is not just confusion about the provision itself, but uncertainty about who would have the legal standing to challenge a candidate on such grounds, what form a challenge could take and whether it would have to wait until after the election or could be made at any time.
In a paper written 20 years ago for the Yale Law Journal on the natural-born enigma, Jill Pryor, now a lawyer in Atlanta, said that any legal challenge to a presidential candidate born outside national boundaries would be “unpredictable and unsatisfactory.”
If you do something, anything, toward those ends this day, we'll all be better off tomorrow.
And if you don't? Well, just don't come to me whining about pogroms (Gd forbid) - because I can tell you right now, I won't be interested.
